A Colourful Dock for AmigaOS 3.1.4 and Running a Script at Startup
You may have seen in screenshots around here that I’ve used use a text-based dock since I started getting back into using an Amiga-based system. The reason for this has been that I couldn’t find a good dock that was simple but colourful. For this reason, I’ve been using ToolManager.
Finding PolyNet
But then I found out about PolyNet NG. This is a launcher that is currently still being supported for MorphOS but also consists of an old unsupported version for 68k platform AmigaOS.
To get it to work, I downloaded and unpacked Common Archive and Old last 68k version into the same folder on my Amiga. Once that was done, i was able to run the Poly_Net executable and configure a bar for myself.
Something to keep in mind though is that this doesn’t come with icons so you have to find those for yourself. For this. I went to Aminet and search for PNG Icon and downloaded some sets that took my fancy.
The application is great and really quite easy to configure, just remember to download the common data (I didn’t and couldn’t understand why it kept crashing on me!)
Running at Startup
However, a problem that stumped me for a while was that I was unable to make the app run at startup. i tried to put it into my startup-sequence and my user-startup but I couldn’t get it to work. Copying the Poly_Net and/or Poly_Net_NG files to WBStartup proved to be just as useless.
What I did was create a text file in TurboText called LaunchPoly which consisted of the following lines of code;
stack 32000 cd workbench:Tools/Poly_Net_NG run >NIL: workbench:Tools/Poly_Net_NG/poly_net_ng
Once I saved the file, I opened the icon information that TurboText created for it and changed it from TTEXT to iconx.
Finally, I copied this file to the WBStartup folder. This, it seems to me so far, did the job and now when I start up my (virtual) Amiga, the dock opens at startup.
One major benefit to this is that I now have the Windows apps configured in a drawer which means the icon vanishes once the app launches. What happened before was I’d click on the icons and the Windows app would launch but my Amiga mouse pointer was still over the dock item meaning I would launch it again once I clicked back to the Amiga.